Lists and Files
Description: Along with this document, you downloaded two data files: shakespeare.txt
and characters.txt. The former contains, according to Project Gutenberg, the complete works of William Shakespeare in plain text. The latter contains the names of 50
of Shakespeare’s characters, again in plain text. Your mission, should you choose to
accept it (no, you don’t really have a choice), is to count the number of times each
character is mentioned in the text of the plays.
Almost all of the Python methods you will need are in the examples we have looked at
in class. In particular, open for opening a file and readlines for reading a file into list
will be useful. The result of readlines will be a list of strings. Recall that you can
use split to tokenize a string into a list of “words.” However, you can instead apply
many list operations to strings as well. Either approach is valid.
Details: Recall that Shakespeare wrote plays. Thus, the shakespeare.txt file contains not
only what the characters said but also labels indicating which character speaks. The
labels are in all caps; you should not count these occurrences of the characters’ names.
characters.txt contains one character per line.
Your program should produce concise, easy-to-read output that reports the number of
occurrences of each character’s name.
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